I never grew up in Pakistan, so maybe my views are skewed. I grew up watching dramas and reading articles about the TV heroines and TV drama protagonists at the time and even I’d say into the 90’s the Pakistani woman portrayed as a protagonist (plays featuring powerful roles played by women like Saba Pervaiz, Faryal Gohar, Rahat Kazmi’s wife forget-her-name, Huma Nawaz, etc.) were powerful women, women seeming to make a change. One drama I remember, Huma Nawaz (where is she now?) played the role of a doctor working in a city hospital, showing how in a big city government hospital the sad state of affairs. I remember these women being in roles where even as wives and daughters, they showed themselves in difficult situations and then TAKING a STAND for themselves and fighting for their own rights, and their own rights in their love lives. One scene I remember maybe it was Saba Pervaiz against Sajid Hasan insisting “Tum mujhe samaj ne ki koshish karo”. Seems like the women of that time were just different.
Or is it that the whole class of educated women from that time period have mostly migrated out of the country, and because of the brain drain and the recent increase in conservatism and in some areas, extremism, there is a push towards the “proper muslim woman” being as it’s often described even in the masjids here in the US as good “mothers, daughters, sisters” and “obedient wives”, there is a rise now in the value of the housewife, which incidentally gets correlated with the UNEDUCATED, POWERLESS, OBEDIENT housewife?
Do you think women have just become more conservative, that feminism is moving backwards and regressing in today’s Pakistani population - is it something just happening to women in Pakistan or is this wave of conservatism even abroad? And maybe conservatism is the wrong word for it.
I just don’t remember the kinds of sermons in masjid when I was growing up that women should stay at home and be obedient, but now, even here in progressive mosques, I sometimes here the message that women should be married early, and even if that comes at the expense of an education, and I have YET to hear a sermon about educating daughters (I think my dad heard one such brief sermon ONCE, and that was about a hadith that suggests a huge reward for educating your daughters and enlightening them with wisdom).
Wouldn’t the frequency of the sermons you’re hearing imply that…there’s a lack or veering away from conservatism instead? Or that there is a shift in priorities that is hurting family dynamics…whether that shift is career-related or even a materialistic one?